Systems Research and Behavioral Science Syst. Res.

27, 537^552 (2010) Published online 23 August 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI:10.1002/sres.1060

&

Research Paper

Integrating Economic Gain in Biosocial Systems

Timothy F. H. Allen1*, Joseph A. Tainter2, John Flynn1, Rachael Steller1, Elizabeth Blenner 1, Megan Pease 3 and Kristina Nielsen 1
1 2

Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA Department of Environment and Society, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA 3 Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

The concept of gain and prot is introduced into ecology as a way of summarizing strategies of biological and social structures. High gain systems can be predicted by ux as they take in fuel at a rate. Low gain systems must rene low-quality materials in order to acquire fuel. Low gain systems are predictable from their plans and coded behaviour. Changes from high to low gain mode and vice versa represent a reordering of a hierarchy over time. We use a catastrophe pleat as a way to model high gain collapse. Collapse is avoided in low gain by planning. At rst, planning enlarges the system through economies of scale, but eventually resources are of such low quality that gathering and rening begins to limit size. We also model shifts from high to low gain with a response surface of resource used against adaptation. There are peaks of high and low gain adaptation with which we analyse termite evolution. Positioning systems on the surface is complicated by valid alternative interpretations of system behaviour. Each low gain phase starts with a burst of high gain so it is possible to reinterpret successive moves to the lower gain as fractal shifts that link successive response surfaces. We propose mathematical protocols for capturing the response surfaces. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords anticipation, biosocial systems, collapse, ecological economics, efciency, hierarchy theory, high low gain, resource use, termites INTRODUCTION Managing complex systems is a deeply reexive process. There are models within models, change within change in appearances as well as change in
* Correspondence to: Timothy F. H. Allen, Department of Botany, Birge Hall, 430 Lincoln Drive, Madison WI 53706-1313. E-mail: tfallen@wisc.edu

the substance over time. Contemporary problems often invoke biosocial systems that are highly organized through models that the system itself possesses independent of any models brought to the situation by the investigator. The banking crisis, climate change and pandemics all have models their own. Clearly bankers have their preferred condition, but also inuenza has a strategy xed by natural selection. We model
Received 3 December 2009 Accepted 11 March 2010

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

RESEARCH PAPER systems that themselves invoke models and narratives. Once the investigator arrives these problem systems will appear to be different depending on the level of analysis chosen by the observer. Standard hierarchy theory has addressed this issue fairly adeptly, but there is yet another layer of uncertainty that has received scant attention. Observed hierarchies change their level structure and organization as they pass through time. Gustafson and Cooper (1990) complained that Allen and Starrs (1982) version of hierarchy theory made much of vertical hierarchies (discourses in levels of analysis) but only gave passing reference to horizontal hierarchies (change in relationships between levels over time). Hierarchies represent a way of expressing organization and so hierarchies changing over time should reect changes in organization. Recent developments in hierarchy theory working in the arena of ecological economics and resource use have found regularities in hierarchical change. This paper will show how new ideas in resource capture, deployment and prot address Gustafsons complaints while they open new doors on managing complexity. All this will help us deal with unruly complexity in contemporary challenges. Here we present advances in the conceptualization of resource capture and deployment to make prot so as to bring hierarchical perspectives closer to mainstream prediction and management. The perspective we take on organisms focuses on what they have to do to stay in business. Players in evolution only win in terms of being able to keep playing, that is stay in business. Wholesale importation of evolutionary ideas into social circumstances has a spotty record including social Darwinism. Even so, casting evolution in terms of making a prot while playing the game allows a unity of concept across biological and social systems. Organisms and social systems both persist by gaining from capturing resources and then doing work through degrading those resources, using resources as fuel (Kay and Schneider, 1994). Prot and Energy Return on Investment (EROI) are common parlance in economics but they have also appeared in biological systems under the rubric of high and low gain (Allen et al., 2001).
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Syst. Res. Gain explains systems behaviour as they capture and convert resources into useful work for the system (Allen et al., 2001; Tainter et al., 2003). The principles for biosocial systems changing over time amounts to changes between modes of gain. High gain systems have access to resources of sufcient quality so that inputs can be used directly without renement. Meanwhile low gain systems capture greater quantities of low quality resource, but must rene inputs before they can be used (Allen et al., 2001; Tainter et al., 2003). The notions of high and low gain divide on the distinction between ux versus coded constraints on that ux. If you can see the ux you cannot see the constraint on the ux and if you can see the constraint the dynamics are stopped by it and you cannot see the ux (Allen, 2010, this volume). That mutual exclusion causes high and low gain activities to represent non-overlapping aspects of resource use and allocation. Uncomplicated by renement and efciency, high gain aspects of systems can be predicted by resource ux: the rate at which resource is captured and spent. The equations of thermodynamics generally apply to the behaviour of high gain systems. Thermodynamics is not efcient or otherwise, the ux just happens according to the second law of thermodynamics giving most probable outcomes. High gain is therefore not about efciency, it is about what is available, how availability changes, and what uxes are involved. In contrast to high gain, low gain does invoke notions of efciency and so moves beyond simple energetics. Efciency gives privilege to some preferred state that invokes values embodied in the models possessed by the observed system. A plan to economize or optimize constrains consumption below the rate of raw thermodynamic ux, giving privilege to the continued existence of fuel in store, something that might be desirable. The efciency of planned action is the device we use to predict under low gain. Plans may control dynamics that occur at given rate, but plans do not themselves occur at a rate. The necessary separation of high from low gain is such that one can see and predict on either rate-dependent behaviour or rateindependent constraints, but not both at the same time.
Syst. Res. 27, 537^552 (2010) DOI:10.1002/sres

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Syst. Res. LEVELS OF ANALYSIS AND SHIFTING PREDICTORS Hierarchies are often addressed vertically by giving one level privilege as others are considered tacit relative to that focal level (see Needham, 1988, for tacit versus focal attention). A complication is that the observer or analyst often chooses to change which level of the hierarchy is focal. As a separate issue, even as the focal level is held constant, an observed hierarchy may itself show reorganization over time as relationships between levels shift. If the life in a small, closed microcosm contains just a rat, the animal will die of suffocation, whereupon the living component becomes bacterial. Life in the microcosm may remain focal but that life has changed completely. By contrast, changes may appear because the observer focuses on something other than the life in a microcosm. In yet another way, for biosocial hierarchies to manifest change in appearance sometimes the order of the observed levels can change, as when individual workers unionize and so gain wider control. Changes over time often lead to modications in the hierarchy, which is itself already given to chimeric transformations in appearance across levels of analysis. All biosocial systems involve ux, which embodies high gain, as well as coded plans, which manifest low gain. With both sides represented (Figure 1) such systems are not intrinsically or materially high or low gain independent of level of analysis. If one changes the boundary of a system while keeping all else equal often the other type of gain will appear. For instance, lling an automobile with gasoline is a high gain activity because ready-made fuel comes into the car from the environment. The fuel is consumed according to available supply. On the other hand, one can expand the bounds of the system to include oil rigs, tankers and oil reneries. While crude oil has high caloric density, it exists at a less pure lower grade than gasoline; high and low gain are comparative issues so in this argument crude oil is low grade, its high embodied energy notwithstanding. Gassing up the car is the endpoint of a long low gain process of capturing lower grade
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

RESEARCH PAPER

Figure 1 There are two basic parts to biological and social systems: thermodynamic happenings and coded limitations. The coded information amounts to plans which are executed in some sort of construction process. In biological systems the codes might be embodied in DNA, hormones or even mating dances. The construction might be protein synthesis, but could equally be making a nest for a bird. In social systems, there are many modes of construction, all involving plans. The whole constructed material system is an update on the narrative that the whole tells its mates, predators and prey. The scientist observes the updated whole with its extended story. The scientists tell stories about those stories amongst themselves. The construction may not live up to the plans such that the system must become something else more efcient by creating a new plan. Economists let their systems continue to tell their respective stories as they watch adjustments in plans as the system repeatedly becomes more economical, more exible or bigger. Ecologists and biologists in general do not wait for their systems to update, and merely note that the old plan fails to work as resources are used up. Economists expect adjustments to be only temporary and simply note that scarcity increases costs that demand ever more efciency

material and rening it to make gasoline (Figure 2). Allen et al. (2009) went through the same argument for nuclear power plants being high gain as they consume fuel rods but low gain if the system is bounded wider to include mining uranium ore and processing it to get the isotope to make the fuel rods. With both ux and constraint present neither has intrinsic privilege, but one must be chosen for predicting the system in a given analysis. The above is a general condition because the equations of thermodynamics are not limited to the ow of heat or energy. Gold can power a social system in a way that is analogous to how heat powers a mechanical system. In one sense gold
Syst. Res. 27, 537^552 (2010) DOI:10.1002/sres

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Syst. Res. more abundant across the whole landscape than is the local higher quality counterpart. This greater global quantity of a resource compared to the aggregate of local hot spots is one manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Left alone most resource will become more diffuse. Think of gold nuggets. Quickly the nuggets are all gone, and miners must turn to gold dust. The critical observation is that there is and always was much more gold in the area as gold dust than as gold nuggets. With the right low gain rening techniques, panning for gold dust is protable and more gold is removed as dust than ever was as nuggets. Beyond that, there is, and always has been, more gold in the diffuse state than there ever was as nuggets or gold dust (Figure 3). More diffuse material almost always exists in greater total amounts. Since the coming of the Industrial Age, we have come to take for granted great production and work output. Part of industrial production rates comes from the huge motive power of fossil fuel, but that is not the whole story. A separate

Figure 2 Whether pumping gasoline is high or low gain depends on the level of analysis. If the boundary is the fuel entering the car, then the system is high gain. But if the system is bounded to include oil drilling, transportation and renement, with crude oil as the original input, then it is low gain

only commands the things that power social systems energetically, but does not power society in a directly energetic fashion. But in society the currency is often literally currency and that is what matters. Work is done under the application of the second law of thermodynamics, which applies not just to energy but also to the concentration of material. Gold can be one such material concentration. The equations that describe how spending riches gets things done can take the same form as the equations for how heat drives a steam engine. The fuel is concentrated and represents the top end of an energy gradient. As fuel is burned, the heat from it becomes diffuse and the temperature goes down. In all this, motive power can be extracted, perhaps to drive a locomotive. Gold in a treasury equally represents the top of a gradient where valuable material is concentrated. While gold itself is not readily seen as having embodied energy, its symbolic effect can get work done. The gold is spent to get work done and in the process it becomes diffuse, distributed across the pockets of those who did work and got coin in recompense.

ECONOMIES OF SCALE: RESOURCE CAPTURE, TRANSFORMATION AND SYSTEM BEHAVIOUR An important property of low quality resource is that it may not exist concentrated locally but is
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Figure 3 As the quality of a resource declines, that which is left occurs in a more diffuse form. If, however, a system can avail itself of the resource in that diffuse state it will nd more resource available than there was for systems that previously used up the quantities of high quality hot spots of resource. It will be more expensive to gather and process such low quality material, but the sheer quantity of resource in that diffuse state can more than make up for the extra effort. There are economies of scale that can, and usually do, make a bigger prot for systems that use poor quality resource. Most of the gold in the world that can be mined is in the form of gold dust, but there is even more gold in a form that is too diffuse to capture Syst. Res. 27, 537^552 (2010) DOI:10.1002/sres

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Syst. Res. issue is the creation of interchangeable parts, such that each item, say a gun, can be mass produced. We easily forget that before the revolver, all guns were made once off as unique items. The parts were made to mesh with the other parts on that particular gun only. Once the parts became universal to all units of that type, say in a Smith and Wesson revolver, then each part could be mass produced. The critical issue was not so much the power of fossil fuel in industry as it was the economy of being able simply to turn a handle to achieve hundreds or thousands of usable parts. This is generally called the economy of scale. Making lots of things that are the same costs much less than making a lesser number of things that are different. While the archetype of the advantages of moving upscale occur in industry, economies of scale turn up in many settings, as when a zooplankton animal learns to ignore all but the commonest phytoplankton food source, thus signicantly increasing efciency of handling. If the system can deal with the lower quality matrix, then it makes a big difference that there is more total quantity of stuff

RESEARCH PAPER that is good enough. Economies of scale associated with the huge amounts of diffuse resource are what pay for the increased effort of chasing and rening diffuse material. So long as a very diffuse version of the resource can be processed efciently to make a workable fuel, then economies of scale can make the difference in protability of actually using such processes. The door to the use of poor raw materials is opened by increased efciency of processing. Matter used as inputs, such as ore, is degraded by extracting the valuable material from the raw input. Low gain systems get more out of a given input of ore or energy of a certain quality than do equivalent high gain systems. Low gain is associated with the deep degradation of inputs to generate very low quality efuent, say ash or slag (Figure 4). Deeper degradation of ore means that more metal or whatever is extracted, and so there is less metal in the degraded slag. At the other end of the fuel cycle, burning fuel generates efuent at a lower quality state, with less energy in it. Deeper degradation of fuel means taking the products of combustion to a lower level state.

Figure 4 High gain takes in high quality material and degrades it without effort put into being efcient: proigate consumption. Low gain efciently degrades inputs to get more work out of them. The option may then be open for taking in lower quality of inputs. There is not only more quantity of raw lower quality inputs, but they also contain potential for producing a greater quantity of rened material that is of the same quality as the high gain inputs used directly as fuel. Degradation is separate from dissipation, which is input quantity times degradation. Low gain in the end gets more work done by increased degradation opening the door to greatly increased dissipation Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Syst. Res. 27, 537^552 (2010) DOI:10.1002/sres

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RESEARCH PAPER Carbon monoxide comes out of the tail pipe of an automobile, but that gas still has energy in it, it will burn. More efcient engines will burn that carbon monoxide or its precursors. The most efcient burning goes all the way down to carbon dioxide and water, the energetic dead state of oxidizing carbon. A biological example here is when respiration takes sugar down to carbon dioxide and water as opposed to fermentation that has alcohol as its efuent with potential energy still left over. All work involves a process of degradation, but the dead state at the bottom of the gradient in biosocial systems is not xed and is actively manipulated to achieve advantage. Yeast, for instance can change the dead state from carbon dioxide to alcohol depending on the absence of free oxygen that would otherwise allow full respiration to carbon dioxide. A characteristic of life is that, through increasing efciency, life can change the dead state; the chemical energy embodied in alcohol notwithstanding, for yeast, alcohol exists in a dead state (Fraser and Kay, 2004). Increased degradation of inputs may produce more work directly, but there is another route to more work. This second path depends on increasing the amount of fuel put into the system (Figure 4). Both deeper degradation and increased inputs can get more work done. Lower quality inputs are more abundant in the environment than higher quality inputs, and therein lies the full potential for low gain systems to achieve more work than equivalent high gain systems. The availability of that extra input pays for the increased costs of deeper processing as well as the cost of processing greater quantities of inputs. This is a version of the economy of scale. The increased expense of processing is covered by the ability to process so much more. Processing larger quantities at a workable prot gives economy of scale.

Syst. Res. increase in organization) as a means to solve problems. The solutions to challenges often involve such things as new activities, more elaborate technologies, new institutions and social roles, and gathering and processing more information. The typical evolution of problemsolving systems is simpler to more complex, as the simplest organizations and technologies are adopted rst, while those that come later tend to be more elaborate and costly. Moreover, as complexity and costs increase, there are diminishing returns to problem solving. The expense of the previous easy solutions becomes the context of the hard problems and that expense remains as an ongoing cost that generally accumulates. Diminishing returns on complexity introduce inexibility, greater cost and loss of resilience. In an analogy to a boat there is loss of freeboard as the vessel is laden and sits lower next to the waterline. Flexibility is lost to societies as they become burdened by the elaboration that comes with complexity (Figure 5). A counterpoint to Tainters issue is the economies of scale discussed above, but such economies are not always available. For instance the raw input might be peasants to be taxed. Peasants are low quality

ECONOMIES OF SCALE VERSUS DIMINISHING RETURNS: SOME BIOSOCIAL EXAMPLES Tainter (1988) notes that societies increase in complexity (differentiate in structure and
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Figure 5 The owchart here explains the diminishing returns on problem solving via internal complexication. Economy of scale, if it is present, can pay for the extra effort of deeper degradation. In this owchart there are no such economies of scale and so the internal complexication solves problems but with diminishing returns. Complexication here costs dearly. The detour to Simplify to cut costs is the only counteracting force available, but it is very rarely employed Syst. Res. 27, 537^552 (2010) DOI:10.1002/sres

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Syst. Res. relative to looted wealth, but there are lots of them. After the switch to taxation there may be need for greater production and that would demand deeper extraction of wealth through higher taxes. The problem is that the taxes still come from the same people who simply bear a greater burden of taxes. The mass of peasants represents an increase in means of extraction over looting scarce gold so there are economies of scale in the move to taxation. However there is no such thing as lower quality peasants of which there are more to tax. Tainters diminishing returns arise when scaling effects are not there to pay for complexication. There are simply diminishing returns at a fundamental level if economies of scale are absent. The whole enterprise becomes less worthwhile. The shift from high to low gain occurs in the context of resources of a given quality being depleted. In general the easiest best quality resources are used rst either by the system in question or its competitors. In any material setting there is an array of resources of various degrees of quality, each with its particular cost of gathering and processing. Any system addressing high quality resources cannot afford to be prudent and plan for the future because it is in competition with, and will lose to, other systems that do not waste effort planning and executing efcient use. Low gain systems exist in a different resource environment under alternative selective pressures. The general pattern is depletion of the highest quality resource leaving successively lower quality. Without high quality resources high gain systems disappear. Often they have evolved to go extinct locally only to return in some other place or at some other time where high quality resource is present. This is the ruderal strategy of Grime (2002) or the r-selection of conventional population biology and evolutionary biology (Southwood, 1976). At a higher level of analysis, vigorous exploitation under local high gain extraction is part of a larger pattern of exploitation where temporary retreat is an active strategy to keep primary production of a renewable resource in high gear. High gain exploitation and retreat is interpretable as a low gain strategy where the average production of the whole area
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

RESEARCH PAPER is increased by keeping all parts in maximum growth in various stages of recovery. This is Odums maximum power principle (Odum and Pinkerton, 1955), where systems pulse in an organized way so as to allow more production in aggregate. There are thus alternative explanations depending on the scale at which the system is bounded. The depletion of a resource base may be seen through the lens of a ratio of how much high quality resource there is in hotspots relative to the aggregate for low quality resource over the whole region. By developing a use for low quality materials, low gain systems take advantage of situations where the ratio of local high quality to global low quality resource is smaller. At rst the decline in the ratio expresses loss of the best hot spots capable of supporting a high gain system. But when most of that is gone, low gain systems drive quality even lower. The ratio keeps going down because of the enormous potential for producing rened material from massive amounts of poor quality raw resource. As oil becomes a difcult resource, gas guzzlers simply go extinct, while hybrid efcient cars suck up the last of the petroleum. While the rst shifts remove high gain potential, the later shifts manifest the consequences of the economies of scale in processing huge quantities of ubiquitous low quality raw resource.

MOVING ALONG THE LOCAL TO GLOBAL RESOURCE RATIO Termites make a very good example of how shifts over evolutionary time follow the patterns of high and low gain. Primitive termites eat good wood in which they live. In the end they literally eat themselves out of house and home. These high gain termites are forced to reproduce and move to a new site where new good wood prevails (Thorne and Traniello, 2003). The forced move amounts to a high gain collapse. More advanced termites eat a wide range of organic materials from the environs (Wilson, 1971). As opposed to the moderate colonies of high gain termites, the large low gain termite colonies live in huge ventilated mounds built of saliva
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RESEARCH PAPER cemented feces. They still eat woody material but they do so by gathering dead and rotting wood from the landscape around them. The large size of these colonies is characteristic of low gain systems. Lower quality woody remains exist in larger quantities over an area than does good wood. Good wood is a local resource, focused on individual chunks. Gathering woody material that is diffuse is clearly low gain and offers economies of scale. Some sixty percent of all termite species go one step further and do not eat wood at all. For a termite, if dead rotting wood still has forty percent of goodness compared to good wood, there is still ve percent goodness left in the soil after the wood has rotted into the soil. In contrast to large low gaining termite colonies, the colonies of soil eating termites are generally very small consisting of twenty to thirty individuals, most of whom live outside the colony itself. In these highly derived colonies (Donovan et al., 2000) only the royals and the brood occupy the physical colony. While the colonies are small, soil eating termites as individuals are very large, which appears to be an adaptation to keeping the low grade material food inside the animal for a long time, long enough to digest the recalcitrant carbon in soil. The termites that eat soil introduce a new turn in the progress to ever lower resource quality. In general, in a move to a lower quality resource, there are increases in the total quantity of resource that can be extracted and made into fuel (e.g. large termite colonies; Figure 3). However, when there is very little goodness in the extremely low quality inputs, the ubiquity of such material cannot compensate for the massive cost of eating and processing such huge amounts of material (Brauman et al., 2000). We see the extreme low quality of soil as capping the amount of energy available over the time available to consume it. True most of the carbon of ecological signicance in the world is embedded in soil, but termites are not in a position to eat enough soil to make up for soil being such a poor carbon source. Unable to take advantage of the gigatons of carbon in the worlds soil, soil eating termites might as well be exploiting a very limited resource. The
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Syst. Res. counter-example here is bacteria that also eat soil carbon but, with their very fast growth rates, are as ubiquitous as their resource. The strategy of soil eating termites is different in that these super low gain systems downgrade. In Figure 5 there is a detour to simplication to overcome the costs of diminishing returns. A similar thing happens in evolution of some families of plant. Once small rudimentary owers have been evolved then cutting down on their number and simplifying is an option. Duck weed, a owering plant, is so rudimentary as to invite being mistaken for an alga, although it is related to the corpse ower with inorescences over 3 meters tall. Simplication is a viable option in both biological and social systems. When, for example, the Byzantine Empire lost half its land to the Arabs in the 7th century AD, the emperor Constans II (641668) dismissed its standing army in favour of a militia (Treadgold, 1995). Instead of receiving full salary from the empire, the militia generated most of their income from farms given to them, and fought better to protect their personal land holdings and families. Byzantine society simplied overall, with loss of urbanization, literacy and numeracy, but this hyper low gain empire resisted Arab invasion more effectively than before. The contemporary First World forced to move to renewable energy may, like Byzantium, have to be active in its simplication on the consumption end of the equation. When the resource becomes so diffuse as to be too expensive to exploit it fully, retrenchment is an option.

FORMAL MODELLING OF PROFIT IN SYSTEMS: A CATASTROPHE MODEL We have two expressions of the dynamics from high to low gain, and on to super low gain. First is a gure that shows a folded pleat in a response surface (Figure 6). The example of termite evolution is a good way to explain this gure. The space of the pleated surface would indicate some sort of cubic equation. The fold indicates an instability, which is the collapse of high gain resource exploitation. At the fold there are insufcient resources available to pay for getting
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RESEARCH PAPER resource. The other dimension of the plane is something like complicatedness of the system as a reection of devices for deeper degradation of resource. The rst part of the journey over the surface is high gain. As resource is used with no adaptation to decline in quality, the system simply heads down hill towards the discontinuity of the fold and eventually over the cliff as the system runs out of resource of sufcient quality. It collapses at point A (Figure 6). A more prudent path would move down the slope but also immediately towards the back of the surface by increasing efcient use of the resource. In this way the prudent track avoids the cliff. This might seem a sensible precaution, but no system ever takes this path because in a high gain environment anything adopting prudent consumption would be out-competed by others employing proigate use of the resource. Human environmental managers and those with green politics often urge prudence and conservation in somewhat self-righteous terms. But human populations never take that advice because they are not prepared to make sacrices. Prudence costs and consumers are unwilling to deny themselves on the basis of mere abstract predictions at the time the ecologists urge restraint. Theoretical outcomes are ignored. Tainter (1988) points out that societies increase in complexity as a problem-solving strategy, and at some point experience diminishing returns on this effort. The end process is often a collapse, unless new energy subsidies can be found. Complexication to solve problems works so long as there are economies of scale. But such economies are unpredictably simply not there. Without economies of scale, complexication is always a temporary benet because digging deeper without the help of economies of scale appears to happen consistently over the mid-term. Absent economies of scale accumulated stress and costs lead to long-term demise. Ravetz (2006) is condent that we cannot get people to respond to abstractions that condently announce that problems are on the way. The practical action he suggests is to clear the decks so as to open a path to frugality and restraint once the actors can see a disaster in the ofng. A sudden awareness anticipates the second track on the surface that skids around the corner to
Syst. Res. 27, 537^552 (2010) DOI:10.1002/sres

Figure 6 Termite evolution from high to low gain on a pleated surface. Starting up in the top left of the surface, high gain termites eat themselves out of house and home, collapsing at point A where the colony must reproduce and move. The shift to low gain always occurs only as the instability is imminent. The course correction at the last minute avoids collapse of the resource base by becoming suddenly much more efcient. The correction may avoid collapse by reaching the continuous surface at point B. The alternative route to B is the dotted line of prudent planning. No system ever does that because it is out-competed by high gain rivals, and there is no incentive to economize anyway. Point B is transitional. It leads to low gain efciency and increase in size due to economies of scale at point C. Burdened with much infrastructure the low-gainers at C can become too large and demanding, in which case they fall over the front side of the surface. The super low gain strategy of the soil eaters goes to point D with deep adaptation and energy limiting super low gain resources

more efcient, and so a budgetary shortfall causes a discontinuity in availability of viable resources. The vertical axis of the gure indicates a dimension of high gain to low gain resource exploitation in terms of resource use and efciency. The tendency is always to move towards low gain because better quality resource that has been harvested already cannot be regained. In the face of a new resource there can be a reset to high gain, although it will be in terms that reect use of a new type of resource, as when Britain moved from burning wood to coal. The surface across which system behaviour moves has two components. One is the decline in resource quality as the most concentrated pockets of resource at any time are used. The system therefore always moves downhill and towards the front of the gure, either going extinct or moving right/backwards into the gure, becoming more efcient to avoid running out of
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RESEARCH PAPER point B in Figure 6, just before the system would otherwise go into high gain collapse. The move to increased efciency is last minute and may or may not work. At a lower level of analysis this is an expression of Tainters observation that planning and problem solving is always last minute and short term. Some systems fairly much drive straight over the cliff. An example of this noted in Allen et al., 2003 is the Abbasid Caliphate of AD 7501258. But other systems do make the turn to survival and low gain efciency. The early Roman Empire, as it neared the end of feasible expansion, centralized power in the late rst century BC in a single ruler whose government ran the empire, not on looted wealth, but on yearly solar energy transformed into agricultural produce. In the late third and early fourth centuries AD, after a long period of invasions and civil wars, the empire subdivided itself into many smaller provinces to deprive governors of the resources needed to rebel. The same largescale reorganization applies to large termite mounds that gather poor wood. In the same stroke both Rome and poor wood termites increased in size because of the economies of scale that come with more efcient degradation of resources. Those systems, and many others, make it safely to point C in Figure 6. In the end such systems fall over the front of Figure 6 when they can adapt no more, being locked into expensive efciencies that made them large. The Western Roman Empire collapsed from scal distress brought on by increasing complexity and diminishing returns in problem solving, notwithstanding increasing efciency in use of low-gain resources. There is still a solution to the problems of old large systems. That is seen in the track in Figure 6 in the move across to the bottom right to point D, where increases in efciency invoke growing smaller or at least simpler by economizing. These systems may be fragile because the resource base is so poor that it limits production. Soil eating termites are so fragile as to be restricted to tropical clemency. But some downsized or simplied systems may last a long time, as did the recovered Byzantine Empire, and as has the simple form of Lemna, the downgrade evolved pond weed.
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Syst. Res. FORMAL MODELLING OF PROFIT IN SYSTEMS: AN ADAPTIVE MODEL With all the ambiguity in scale and shifting signicance in resource use, we need to be able to identify unequivocally what is the system under consideration. We tie that identity to the system as it uses resource as fuel. All biosocial systems have to burn fuel and it is an unequivocal act: fuel in; fuel spent; work done. The system using fuel is rm because the more ambiguous aspects of resource use all end up generating fuel for burning. With regard to actually using material to do work, it makes little difference whether the system takes in fuel more or less directly or has to make the fuel from low-grade material. Fuel goes into an automobile unambiguously, while how far down the supply chain we look can be equivocal. The different specications of system boundaries are chosen by the analyst and are not set in nature, but they do make a difference as to how one predicts system behaviour even if bounding the system does not determine what one is in essence talking about. We have shown above that depletion of resources turns on the degree of availability. First local hot spots are used leaving only more diffuse versions of the resource in the wild. The driving variable we use in our analytical space is the ratio of local to global resource in the vicinity of the system exploiting that resource (Figure 7). The second variable in our model is adaptation. Wrights (1931) adaptive landscape is the inspiration for peaks of adaptation on our adaptive landscape. Since we are examining adaptation across a response surface, adaptation at one place on the landscape may be different in quality from adaptation at another spot on that same surface. For instance, should a naive system adapted to some other circumstance encounter a high gain resource that it can use, the old adaptations become superuous and so in time will be shed (starting at point A in Figure 7). An example here might be zooplankton feeding on a variety of prey items in an indecisive way. Commonly these animals go on to identify what is the commonest food source and then ignore all others. A zooplankter feeding on just one type of particle can be seen as being in high gain mode as
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Figure 7 An adaptive landscape showing the peaks for high and low gain situations. The dynamics never move back towards the back left side because local hot spots of resource are used irreversibly. Adaptations can, however, move right parallel to the back left edge. The high gain peak is set in readily available patches of excellent quality resource. As resources are used, high gain systems that do not adapt move to extinction at B, down the back right edge of the surface. Adaptation to lower quality resource must wait for lower quality to begin to prevail at point C. From point C adaptation to lower quality resource moves the system across to the high saddle, which is the passageway to the low gain peak. Further efcient degradation may arise from yet greater restrictions taking the system to the austerity of point D

it lets the potential in other resource particles pass by with no attempt at capture. The third variable is degree of adaptation, which we take to be the length of time that the adaptation predicts the future. Adaptation has a component of anticipation in it (Rosen, 1979) and the high gain system anticipates that the abundant high quality resource will continue to exist; tomorrow will be like today. This is often valid, at least for a while, since the best predictor for what will happen immediately is usually the situation that prevails in the present. Of course a system well adapted to a high gain situation will have adaptations to proigate use of a resource, but we assess that as a situation with less adaptation because the anticipation is short term. In contrast to the high gain prediction there is a low gain prediction based on frugality. Frugal use of a low quality resource places dependence on a resource that is larger and so will last longer. Low gain is adapted to a situation that will persist, and therein lies the longer term prediction. High gain systems are locked into their
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short-term predictions, and so cannot work over the long term. We see adaptation to poorer resource quality as a longer term anticipation that requires the system to be more highly adapted as a specialist system. Adaptation to a long-term outcome often requires more control, such as a capacity to degrade recalcitrant material. Tainter et al. (2003) discuss ants that farm fungi in terms of a low gain adaptation. The long-term predictions by Atta leaf cutting ants are that leaves will always be there. But that prediction only pertains when a very specic strain of fungus is entrained by the ants with exquisite care so as to achieve the deep degradation of the leaves, converting them into large quantities of fungus (Wilson, 1971). Elaborate specializations usually lead the system into a longer term future. There are two peaks on the adaptive landscape: one is high gain (HI) and the other is low gain (LO; Figure 7). The high gain peak is situated where local resources are very high quality, demanding essentially no renement or processing. Such a system is focused, but careless in its
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RESEARCH PAPER use of resources. Contrary to the predictions of high gain systems, quality resources are in fact used up: bad news for the high gain system. The decline along the back right edge of the space leads to the collapse of the high gain system at point B in Figure 7. There quickly comes a point where demise is locked in, as the resource base passes the point where there is any solution to the high gain resource problem. A high gain strategy is on a one way street to demise (point B in Figure 7). An important rule is that selection cannot move the system towards deeper long-term anticipation if the resource is still local and abundant. Any system that becomes more frugal and long term adapted too early will simply be driven extinct by high gain competitors (just above point C in Figure 7). Such attempts by some management effort to address long term planning will meet Jevons paradox (Polimeni et al., 2008). In the 19th Century Jevons (1866) noted increased efciency of steam engines actually increased coal consumption rather than conserve coal (Allen, 2010, this volume). Jevons paradox will manifest itself when human design tries to look prematurely to the long term through increased efciency. All that happens is the efciencies are folded into continued short sighted consumption. In nature evolution simply will not go into Jevons paradox because there is no selective advantage. Humans often sanctimoniously bemoan waste and imprudence, and preach about conservation, but human systems more or less never take the prudent path along the front left edge of Figure 7. In Figure 7 there is an entry point at point A where a naive system faces a potentially high gain resource. It appears that something quite like wood eating cockroaches gave rise to the termites (Nalepa, 1984). We can think of wood eating cockroaches as naively muddling through with wood as a resource, while not taking full advantage of it. Were a cockroach-like creature able shed it adaptations of loose colonies it would move to become over long term evolution some version of a primitive termite (positioned at the HI peak of Figure 7). At rst the decline of the high gain environment is not deep enough to get past Jevons
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Syst. Res. paradox. But soon high gain depletion of resource puts selective pressure against the proigate resource use. There is selective pressure to evolve a scheme that looks to longer term resource use. We have shown this in Figure 7 as a departure from the path of high gain collapse about half way down (point C). In that environment where high gain resources are rapidly disappearing there is strong selective pressure to degrade deeper making lower quality inputs more valuable. The move is from the back right side of the surface towards the front left edge in Figure 7. As the system increases its capacity to degrade inputs, the economies of scale discussed above come into play. Accordingly a new adaptive peak is achieved and the system enters large scale, low gain. The big termite colonies would be this phase. A relatively large biological or social system, be it a large ant colony or an expanding human empire, invites an explanation of a low gain adaptive peak. While most termite biomass as a whole is embodied in large low gain colonies, 60% of species of termites eat soil (Point D in Figure 7). This end phase of termite evolution gives small, almost token colonies. In social systems this end phase would invoke the loss of high complexity, as in the Byzantine recovery or the rump of the Western Roman Empire in Western Europe. In Figure 7 all these simpler systems have overshot and come off the back side of the high low gain peak, moving on to point D.

MODELLING STRATEGIES There are various strategies for modelling the movement across the surface of Figure 7. One could be the use of a two dimensional Markov chain. The edges of the smaller squares on that gure could be associated with a chance of transition to the adjacent square on that side. Back left edges of all squares in Figure 7 would have a probability of transition set to zero, since there is no way to reverse the decreasing ratio of local to global resource. These zeros spell out the necessary demise of high gain systems gone too far past the low gain peak, either on the high gain side or the super-low gain overshoot. At the point
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Syst. Res. of Jevons paradox just above point C in Figure 7 there would be no probability of moving away from the high gain edge. But at point C itself, a fairly high probability of moving towards the low gain peak would emerge. All this being said, a Markov model could capture the movement, but would mostly be a bookkeeping exercise offering little analytical insight. An alternative modelling scheme might use differential equations. Various relationships between the three dimensions might be captured. The appeal of this investigative strategy might be insights from the form of the equations. Analytical methods do offer such perks. It would also be possible to check structural stability as the equations are jostled with small changes in their structure to see what happens to the surface. Holling and Ewing (1971) found that changing the tightness of the coupling of host parasite equations gave insights into the stability properties associated with increased efciency. Perhaps a differential equation approach could give further insights into the subtle relationships in resource use and efciency. Figure 6 obviously invites a topological approach to modelling resource use. Topology can be very graphic and general in the insights it gives. Topological models announce instabilities. There may be instabilities that have escaped our logic and interpretation of examples, and a topological analysis might nd them. Topology says things like, If the system keeps going in this direction it will sooner or later encounter this instability. All this is helpful but topology will tell us little about where in particular the instability is and what are the details of going over the edge. By contrast, differential equations do not anticipate instabilities well in principle, but they do give a good account of the demise as it is happening in the part of the space where the surface folds.

RESEARCH PAPER the very same place at the very same time as being different. In real time, in a habitat, biological or social systems interact amongst themselves. How that interaction works out depends on how the various exemplar systems interpret and respond to the narrative of the other systems. The different narratives will cause the respective systems to read the selfsame material situation differently. Biosocial interaction amounts to the interaction of different narratives. The outcomes of such interactions are not readily predictable from comparing high and low gain in principle because the detailed happenstance of the interaction is what counts. Harper performed experiments where he observed the population parameters of aquatic plants, which would be readily interpretable as being characteristically high or low gain: instantaneous growth rate and biggest daily increment can be easily seen as high gain characteristics, whereas maximum standing crop suggests a low gain adaptation (Clatworthy and Harper, 1962). In our situation these parameters would be the parameters of efciency and capacity to degrade resources. When Harper set his different species in competition, none of the parameters of growth in monoculture predicted the outcome exactly. The winner simply had a trick up its sleeve that happened to beat the losing competitors. The message in the present argument is that, general trends notwithstanding, the winner in a contest of high versus low gain strategy will come from the incidental interactions of narratives in the particular situation. The formal space we have erected is very labile, not just because of the differences between the species in play, but also because the scientist may validly interpret the behaviour of a certain species in several ways. As an alternative to the discussion of high gain above, we can see cockroaches themselves as the high gain players. Cockroaches are much less efcient than termites in exploiting wood, and so appear to be making much less of an investment. Lower investment and inefciency in digesting recalcitrant resources might be seen as more high gain than termites in good wood, inefciency and waste being high gain hallmarks. That would move wood eating cockroaches to the top of the
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INTERACTING HIERARCHIES Thus far, we have shown a space in which complex systems change in a patterned fashion. A complication is that different systems with different models and narratives are going to read
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Syst. Res. gathered low quality wood in a manner that put them on the low gain peak in the previous interpretation. The answer provides a general insight. Their low gain position on our landscape under the shift in the observers viewpoint has been usurped by the termites that live in good wood (who were formerly seen as high gain). Imagine that the backside of the low gain peak is replaced by a smaller landscape that is self-similar in a fractal manner to the whole landscape. The low gain peak on the whole landscape simply maps onto the high gain peak of the new smaller landscape, and a new smaller low gain peak appears closer to the viewer of Figure 8. At the outset of every low gain cycle, is a high gain peak, where those players who rst enter the new low gain universe have an easier time of it than do the later players. Thus the beginning of a low gain cycle may be high or low gain depending on the level of analysis (Allen et al., 2009). The low gain peak on the larger landscape doubles as a high gain peak on the smaller fractal landscape at the start of a new low gain cycle. The issue is that the relationship between cockroach ecology and termites that eat good wood is in different terms than the relationship between termites that eat good wood and those that eat bad wood. The fractal pattern is smaller because the return on a given unit of consumption is smaller, even though in aggregate efcient more low gain consumption as a whole actually captures in the end more quantity of resource. This process could go on indenitely as yet smaller fractal landscapes are generated. In this scenario, the super-low gain strategy of eating soil, occupies the low gain peak on a third even smaller fractal landscape. Fractal systems represent some fundamental process that propagates up scale in terms of efciency and may yet be traced down scale in the fractal pattern. The lower the peaks, the lower return per unit of activity as the system becomes more low gain, despite sometimes there being an increase in long term resource capture. The general relationship that is propagated is the set of high to low gain relationships that may apply across a range of disparate species comparisons. In social systems there is not natural selection per se, and so we have more opportunities to see naked encounters of different resource strategies
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Figure 8 When cockroaches are seen as high gaining, the formerly high gaining termites are recast as being efcient wood eaters, and indeed they are relative to cockroaches. This moves those formerly high gaining termites to the low gain peak. The formerly low gain termites that eat rotting wood are then displaced. They appear on a fractally smaller landscape that presents the whole landscape again on the backside of the low gain peak but smaller. The high gain peak of the new small landscape maps onto the old low gain peak. The relationship between cockroaches and good wood termites is then simply different in fractal terms from the relationship between high and low gain termites. One could iterate further smaller landscapes by addressing soil eating termite coming off the low gain peak of the landscape up one fractal level

high gain peak in Figures 7 and 8. The increased capacity to degrade wood with more sophisticated colonies and gut ora in termites could be taken, not as opening the door to high gain exploitation of wood, but as specialization in increasing efciency of consumption in a move to low gain exploitation of wood more efciently than roaches. The roaches and termites are doing the same thing we described before, but we are giving it a different interpretation. On the response surface, this argument moves them from the one adaptive peak to the other (Figure 8). Thus the position of a given species occupies in our space depends very much how we interpret the other species or the other societies to which comparison is being made. The intellectual manoeuvre of moving cockroaches from entry status to high gaining exposes a more general pattern. If the formerly high gain termites move to the low gain peak, one can ask what happens to the efcient wood eaters that
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Syst. Res. within one species. If there is head to head use of an abundant resource then the system that is more opportunistic and proigate in its use of resources will generally win out. On the other hand, low gain players such as peasants can overcome high gain authority, but there must be lots of them and they must be well led, that is be well organized (Wolf, 1969). High and low gain each come with their own costs and it depends on the details of the encounter and the quirks of the interaction of the respective narratives as to which one wins. There is slack and the playing eld is heterogeneous and so one can expect many ways to get by in a given environment. Even though many outcomes are possible, understanding high and low gain and their patterns of transition claries most situations.

RESEARCH PAPER efciencies associated with all of those phases so that efciency is not just one thing. Very low quality must be captured in great quantities, but once they are captured there is more that is usable in them if only the system can rene the inputs sufciently. More efcient degradation of inputs to capture usable material or energy opens the door to economies of scale as poorer quality inputs become worth gathering. Such economies of scale pay for the increased demands of efciency, allowing the system to expand. Deeper degradation of the same quality input gives more usable material but only sometimes enough more to pay for the deeper degradation. In biology, evolution must always be in the black at some level, otherwise there are no selective pressures for increased efciency. Research and development (R&D) as a conscious investment affects the time to start making prot in social systems, but one can get too clever by half. The door is open in that situation for failure of return on investment and viscous diminishing returns. It is diminishing returns on high complexity and low-gain efciency that causes complex societies to become vulnerable to collapse (Tainter, 1988). In the end, increases in efciency in one realm do not match demands for efciency in other parts of the capture/rene/burn triplet. Great efciency in degradation, as occurs in soil eating termites, cannot be matched by the huge expense of processing such huge amounts of material. The ultimate utility of this whole scheme is in how it informs the investigator of a set of options, rst for change inside a hierarchy, and second for change in an interaction between hierarchies, between players in a resource space. While the modelling appears tidy and reasonable, in the end there is the messiness of particular details of specic interactions in particular times and places. At this point, we appear to have a framework wherein we can do the natural history of biological and social systems with regard to resource use. After some further research effort, we will learn what to expect from putting specic systems onto our resource surface. The next advance will take advantage of those expectations. At this point we have a primitive understanding of resource use, but at least we have a framework in which to inform ourselves.
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CONCLUSION It appears possible to model the transition from high to low gain, but the space is difcult. First, the importance of the decline in local quality (steepness of the slope down) is different all over the surface. With greater usable resource, a low gain system consumes on the different time frame of depletion, relative to a high gain system. There appear to be important places where value of a resources declines steeply for some systems. Meanwhile elsewhere the surface may be fairly at such that changes on the surface matter little. We have tried to capture some of that by the curvature on the surface. A second wrinkle depends on assertions as to where on the landscape are the players in any comparison made across the surface. Above we called cockroaches eating wood naive entrants to the space of using wood, but also saw them alternatively as high gainers, so that the same species in the same environment may be seen differently. The evolution to become termites is in different terms than the evolution inside termite ecology. The space appears quite local, indicating we have to be very specic as to what is being normalized relative to what. Another challenge in the modelling effort is the three aspects of resources processing and use: capturing; rening; using (burning). There are
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